The Dynamic Radio Sky

Abstract

Transient radio sources are necessarily compact and usually are the locations of explosive or dynamic events, therefore offering unique opportunities for probing fundamental physics and astrophysics. In addition, short-duration transients are powerful probes of intervening media owing to dispersion, scattering and Faraday rotation that modify the signals. While radio astronomy has an impressive record obtaining high time resolution, usually it is achieved in quite narrow fields of view. Consequently, the dynamic radio sky is poorly sampled, in contrast to the situation in the X-ray and gamma-ray bands. The SKA has the potential to change this situation, opening up new parameter space in the search for radio transients. We summarize the wide variety of known and hypothesized radio transients and demonstrate that the SKA offers considerable power in exploring this parameter space. Requirements on the SKA to search the parameter space include the abilities to (1) Make targeted searches using beamforming capability; (2) Conduct blind, all-sky surveys with dense sampling of the frequency-time plane in wide fields; (3) Sample the sky with multiple fields of view from spatially well-separated sites in order to discriminate celestial and terrestrial signals; (4) Utilize as much of the SKA's aggregate collecting area as possible in blind surveys, thus requiring a centrally condensed configuration; and (5) Localize repeating transient sources to high angular precision, requiring a configuration with long baselines, thus requiring collecting area in both a centrally condensed "core" array and sufficient area on long baselines.

16 pages, 4 figures in 4 PostScript files; to appear in "Science with the Square Kilometer Array," eds. C. Carilli and S. Rawlings, New Astronomy Reviews (Elsevier: Amsterdam)

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Cited by in corpus (43)

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• The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) survey
• A Complete Survey of the Transient Radio Sky and Implications for Gamma-Ray Bursts, Supernovae, and other Relativistic Explosions
• VAST: An ASKAP Survey for Variables and Slow Transients
• Further Searches for RRATs in the Parkes Multi-Beam Pulsar Survey
• SubmilliJansky Transients in Archival Radio Observations
• Variable and Transient Radio Sources in the FIRST Survey
• A search for rotating radio transients and fast radio bursts in the Parkes high-latitude pulsar survey
• Fast Radio Bursts
• A Search for New Galactic Magnetars in Archival Chandra and XMM-Newton Observations
• An automated archival VLA transients survey
• Surveying the Dynamic Radio Sky with the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array
• A search for long-timescale, low-frequency radio transients
• Automatic classification of time-variable X-ray sources
• Constraining the nature of the 18-min periodic radio transient GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3 via multi-wavelength observations and magneto-thermal simulations
• A Faint, Steep Spectum Burst from the Radio Transient GCRT J1745-3009
• Blindly Detecting Merging Supermassive Black Holes with Radio Surveys
• GCRT J1745-3009: A precessing radio pulsar?
• Detection of fast radio transients with multiple stations: a case study using the Very Long Baseline Array
• ASGARD: A Large Survey for Slow Galactic Radio Transients. I. Overview and First Results
• New Limits on the Low-frequency Radio Transient Sky Using 31 hr of All-sky Data with the OVRO-LWA
• The Allen Telescope Array Pi GHz Sky Survey - III: The ELAIS-N1, Coma, and Lockman Hole Fields
• Detection of a Low-frequency Cosmic Radio Transient Using Two LWA Stations
• Upper Limits on X-ray Emission from Two Rotating Radio Transients
• A method of detecting radio transients
• Searching for Fast Radio Transients with SKA Phase 1
• Radio Variable and Transient Sources on Minute Timescales in the ASKAP Pilot Surveys
• Comparison of RFI Mitigation Strategies for Dispersed Pulse Detection
• Transient Events in Archival Very Large Array Observations of the Galactic Center
• Detection of fast transients with radio interferometric arrays
• An Arecibo Search for Pulsars and Transient Sources in M33
• Hunting Gravitational Waves with Multi-Messenger Counterparts: Australia's Role
• Chandra Smells a RRAT: X-ray Detection of a Rotating Radio Transient
• Two efficient, new techniques for detecting dispersed radio pulses with interferometers: The Chirpolator and The Chimageator
• EMBRACE@Nancay: An Ultra Wide Field of View Prototype for the SKA
• Real Time Event Detection in Astronomical Data Streams: Lessons from the VLBA
• The ASKAP Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) Pilot Survey
• An ultraviolet burst oscillation candidate from the low-mass X-ray binary EXO 0748-676
• The self-cohering tied-array